Then, all suffused with all that nostalgia, I went back to re-read Barlow's canon, via the wikipedia link.

Somebody will login to wikipedia and fix that link, I'm sure. If someone else doesn't fix it, I will, but not today. A lot of people care about the Net, maybe not in the same way we did back in the 80s and 90s, but they care enough to keep it alove alive. Some of the ideals we had then really did creep into the real world, and the world is better for it.